i woke up at 9:30am with sandy in the bathroom getting ready to go to work. soon after she got out she left. for some reason the automated heat didn't kick in this morning and it was 59°F in the house. the nest thermostat said it was heating but there just wasn't any heat. i was afraid the furnace might be broken but the glitch seemed to be app-related, because my phone thought the room temperature was 66°F. i fixed it by just adjusting the setting and that's when i heard the furnace roaring to life.

there was a noontime lecture at harvard i wanted to check out titled, "reconstructing the history of chinese dialects through foreigners' eyes." since it was right at noontime, i had a suspicion that it was a lunch lecture, so i only ate half a blueberry muffin before going.

sure enough, there was a table of catered food. i grabbed a nantucket nectar drink, a bag of cape cod chips, some fruit salad, some caesar salad, and a ham sandwich. i finished eating before the lecture began.

the talk itself wasn't what i had in mind, mainly focused on the abundance of dialects in southeastern china (e.g. cantonese region). there was no mention of the sichuan dialect, and i think the speaker probably considered it more of a heavy accent. most of the talk was peppered with specific linguistic examples (pulled from missionary bible translations in the local vernacular) that i felt didn't really address the overall subject. the history of chinese dialects is an interesting topic but i don't think i learned very much. the Q&A afterwards was more interesting, a lot of linguistics in the audience. even though i was exactly sure what they were talking about, it was interesting to hear nevertheless. i walked back home afterwards.

later in the afternoon i went to the dollar store to get some 9V batteries for the beeping kitchen smoke detector. trying to loose some weight, i resisted the temptation to get some snacks.

today was a beautiful clear and cold blue sky day. we made a new production record for 2019 at 41.38kWh, breaking the 40.22kWh record from a week ago. last march, we only broke 40kWh+ 5 times, all in the second half of the month, the highest production being march 31st 2018 with 46.54kWh.

sandy came home at 6pm. after a shower, she cooked some glass noodles with turkey ham and was eating in the living room by 7pm. she was also chatting loudly with kelvin. i increased the volume on the tv to hint my annoyance but i don't think she noticed. thankfully she chatted for just 15 minutes. for my own dinner i cooked some rice and reheated the leftover lion's head meatballs my mother gave yesterday.

a terrible stink permeated the house much of the day. as sandy is a voracious meat eater, all the meat packaging she's thrown into the trash has now had several days to go rotten. as trash day is tomorrow, i waited until she was done with dinner before finally taking out the trash.